“I have a proposition for you.”
Frances may have imagined it, but she thought she saw something spark in Irene’s dark brown eyes. “What is it?”
“Do you want to know right here?”
Irene hesitated. “No,” she admitted, and suddenly turned and started walking.
Did that mean no, she didn’t want to hear about it here? Or no, she didn’t want to hear about it at all? But before she could call after Irene and ask her to clarify, Irene stopped and turned around. “Are you coming, or what?”
They ended up at an outdoor juice bar on the Shady Acres property. Irene had removed her Merlin the Magician caftan and was wearing white capris and a pink silk top. She looked like a tourist. She insisted on choosing Frances’s smoothie because Frances was pale, and she knew just the thing to put a little life in her. They sat at a table with an umbrella turned jauntily toward the sun, but that did little to dispel the heat.
Before anything else, they went over the basics of their livessince the big blowup. Frances told Irene about her life with Nick and Aaron. And then Nick’s ALS diagnosis and his long slide into death. Irene listened impassively, nodding occasionally, and when Frances had finished, she said simply, “That sucks.” She’d never been overly sentimental.
“Yeah, it did,” Frances said. “Does,” she amended. She wondered briefly if Nick had ever had the thoughts she was having—like how there wasn’t much to fight for, and if she was going to go because of some stupid disease, she’d hope for sooner rather than later.
She shook the thought off. “What about you? Ever marry?”
“God, no,” Irene said. “I’m too busy to cook and clean for some asshole.”
That was a reductive definition of marriage, but Frances understood. “So, what have you been doing?”
“Well, right now, I’m running this Tantric scam,” she said with a shrug.
“It’s a scam?” Frances asked, surprised.
“Of course it is. You think I would take the time to learn how to teach Tantric sex? You just google it and throw together a couple of certificates, and everyone takes your word for it.” She sipped her smoothie and added, “I’ve been doing a little hacking on the side, too.”
For a moment, Frances didn’t understand. She imagined Irene chopping wood for exercise. “What, like wood?”
“No, Frances, not like wood,” Irene said, annoyed. “Hacking computer systems.”
Frances almost spit out her disgusting green smoothie. “What?”
“Why not?” Irene asked. “Cybersecurity specialists never suspect little old ladies.”
Well, that was certainly a truth universally accepted—women over sixty were pretty much invisible to society at large. “What have you been hacking?”
“Nothing big,” Irene said. “Local banks. A spa that ripped me off. Old people.”
“Irene.You’rean old person.”
“Don’t Irene me. Iaman old person, which is why I’m good at it. I know the right things to say. And anyway, you’re the one who turned me into a criminal.”
“I did not. You fully agreed.”
“You presented me with the opportunity.”
“My dad had died, remember?”
“Lots of people’s fathers die and they don’t become thieves.”
Frances groaned. “Fair,” she conceded.
“And anyway, you can’t tell me you never kept up with our work.”
She made it sound like their “work” was noble and just. “I tried once and busted my head open.”
“Amateur,” Irene scoffed. “So why are you here, Saint Frances?”
